Soon after the concept of economic clusters became popular in the early 1990s aiming to explain national and (subnational) regional economic success, it has been picked up as a guideline for pro-actively promoting industrial competitiveness and innovativeness by fostering sectoral specialization and collaboration. Implementing and operationalizing clusters in a practical approach, however, is a complex task which actually requires to reflect on various issues, such as conceptual foundations, spatial scale, main objectives and institutional form of support, before respective measures get initiated. This paper focuses on the question of effective innovation-enhancing institutional forms of cluster promotion, indirectly also addressing other major issues. It discusses two opposite modes of institutionalization which both relate to the creation of regional cluster-related advantages: On the one hand, explicit cluster policies that are implemented top-down by regional authorities; on the other hand, implicit initiatives that emerge bottom-up from groups of sector-related firms without a concrete political impetus. The two approaches are compared from a theoretical perspective, looking at probable differences regarding the support of positive dynamics associated with the cluster idea. Additionally, an ongoing empirical project is introduced which investigates two initiatives that promote regionally concentrated automotive supply firms, in the Euregio Maas-Rhine (Germany/Netherlands/Belgium) and in Styria (Austria), the first one relating to the implicit bottom-up logic of support and the second one to the explicit top-down variant. The findings may support the assumption that different institutional modes of innovation-oriented cluster promotion display differing patterns and degrees of effectiveness and efficiency.

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